Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), known by his pen name , was an English novelist and journalist. His work is marked by clarity, intelligence and wit, awareness of social injustice, opposition to totalitarianism, and commitment to democratic socialism.

Considered perhaps the 20th century's best chronicler of English culture, Orwell wrote literary criticism, poetry, fiction and polemical . He is best known for the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and the allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945), which together have sold more copies than any two books by any other 20th-century author. His book Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences in the , is widely acclaimed, as are his numerous essays on politics, literature, language and culture. In 2008, The Times ranked him second on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945.

Life:
Eric Arthur Blair was born on 25 June 1903, in Motihari, Bihar, in
Eric Blair described his family as "lower-upper-middle class". His father, Richard Walmesley Blair, worked in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service. His mother, Ida Mabel Blair (née Limouzin), grew up in Moulmein, Burma, where her French father was involved in speculative ventures
He studied at until December 1921, when he left at age 18½.
Blair's academic performance reports suggest that he neglected his academic studies,but during his time at Eton he worked to produce a College magazine, The Election Times, joined in the production of other publications—College Days and Bubble and Squeak—and participated in the Eton Wall Game. His parents could not afford to send him to university without another [?], and they concluded from his poor results that he would not be able to win one.

London and Paris
Early in autumn 1927 he moved to [?].
In imitation of Jack London, whose writing he admired (particularly "The People of the Abyss"), Orwell started to explore slumming the poorer parts of London. For a while he "went native" in his own country, dressing like a tramp and making no concessions to middle-class mores and expectations; he recorded his experiences of the low life for use in The Spike, his first published essay in English, and in the second half of his first book, [?] (1933).

In the spring of 1928 he moved to [?]. He lived in the Rue du Pot de Fer, a working class district in the 5th Arrondissement. His aunt Nellie Limouzin also lived in Paris and gave him social and, when necessary, financial support. He began to write [?], including an early version of Burmese Days but nothing else survives from that period. He was more successful as a journalist and published articles in Monde

He fell seriously ill in February 1929 and was taken to the Hôpital Cochin in the 14th arrondissement, a free hospital where medical students were trained. His experiences there were the basis of his essay How the Poor Die, published in 1946. He chose not to identify the hospital, on the rue de Rivoli, which he later described in Down and Out in Paris and London.
In December 1929, after nearly two years in Paris, Blair returned to England and went directly to his parents' house in Southwold, which was to remain his base for the next five years. The family was well-established in the town and his sister Avril was running a tea-house there.
Teaching career

In April 1932 Blair became a [?] at The Hawthorns High School, a prep school for boys in Hayes, West London. This was a small school offering private schooling for children of local tradesmen and shopkeepers, and had only twenty boys and one other master
He finally adopted the name George Orwell because "It is a good round English name." Down and Out in Paris and London was published on 9 January 1933, Down and Out was successful and was next published by Harper and Brothers in New York.
In the summer of 1933 Blair left Hawthorns to become a teacher at Frays College, in Uxbridge, West London. This was a much larger establishment with 200 pupils and a full complement of staff.

Orwell married Eileen O'Shaughnessy on 9 June 1936. Shortly afterwards, the political crisis began in Spain and Orwell followed developments there closely. At the end of the year, concerned by Francisco Franco's military uprising, (supported by Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and local groups such as Falange), Orwell decided to go to Spain to take part in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side.
Orwell's experiences in the Spanish Civil War gave rise to [?] (1938).

Orwell returned to England in June 1937.

World War II and Animal Farm

Orwell was declared "unfit for any kind of military service" by the Medical Board in June, but soon afterwards found an opportunity to become involved in war activities by joining the Home Guard
Early in 1941 he started writing for the American Partisan Review

In August 1941, Orwell finally obtained "war work" when he was taken on full-time by the BBC's Eastern Service. He supervised cultural broadcasts to India to counter propaganda from Nazi Germany designed to undermine Imperial links. This was Orwell's first experience of the rigid conformity of life in an office.

At the BBC, Orwell introduced Voice, a literary programme for his Indian broadcasts, and by now was leading an active social life with literary friends, particularly on the political left. Late in 1942, he started writing regularly for the left-wing weekly Tribune. In March 1943 Orwell's mother died and around the same time he started working on a new book, which would turn out to be Animal Farm.

He returned finally to London to cover the 1945 UK General Election at the beginning of July.
Animal Farm: A Fairy Story was published in Britain on 17 August 1945, and a year later in the U.S., on 26 August 1946.
Animal Farm struck a particular resonance in the post-war climate and its worldwide success made Orwell a sought-after figure.

For the next four years Orwell mixed journalistic work – mainly for Tribune, The Observer and the Manchester Evening News, though he also contributed to many small-circulation political and literary magazines – with writing his best-known work, [?], which was published in 1949.
Orwell returned to London in late 1946 and picked up his literary journalism again.
. In June 1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four was published to immediate critical and popular acclaim.
During most of his career, Orwell was best known for his journalism, in essays, reviews, columns in newspapers and magazines and in his books of reportage: Down and Out in Paris and London (describing a period of poverty in these cities), The Road to Wigan Pier (describing the living conditions of the poor in northern England, and the class divide generally) and Homage to Catalonia.
Modern readers are more often introduced to Orwell as a novelist, particularly through his enormously successful titles Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Influence on language and writing
In his essay Politics and the English Language (1946), Orwell wrote about the importance of precise and clear language, arguing that vague [?] can be used as a powerful tool of political manipulation because it shapes the way we think.
The adjective Orwellian connotes an attitude and a policy of control by propaganda, surveillance, misinformation, denial of truth, and manipulation of the past.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell described a totalitarian [?] that controlled thought by controlling language, making certain ideas literally unthinkable. Several words and phrases from Nineteen Eighty-Four have entered popular language.
Big Brother is a [?].